vase

Louis C. Tiffany was the most influential American glass designer in the early twentieth century and he introduced a variety of artistic shapes and decorations which were groundbreaking in their designs. Interestingly, Tiffany, the son of the jewelry store owner, did not create any of the glass himself. He hired Arthur J. Nash, an Englishman who had worked in several glasshouses in the Stourbridge area and then come to the United States to find a glass-making job at higher pay. Nash was a very practical glass technician and an experienced supervisor and he was able to experiment in order to achieve the colors and artistic results that Tiffany desired. This vase is blown, with applied leaves which are further shaped by cutting. The leaves are very natural looking, in spite of the extensive work which went into their design. It is signed on the base, “L.C. Tiffany Favrile 3046A”. The letter A in the mark indicates the relatively early date of the piece as the Tiffany pieces shown at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 had the same letter, Vases with this type of decoration seem only to have been made in the first decade of the twentieth century.